Relaxed Phylip Format

Relaxed PHYLIP Format:

Relaxed Phylip is a modification of the original Phylip format, it was created to deal with the fact that many data sets cannot uniquely identify each taxa with only ten characters.

Although it arose from Phylip, the similar names imply they closely related, and this is not the case from the standpoint of parsing.

For relaxed Phylip format, there is a nomimal limit of 250 characters for each taxon name. To allow for variable length names, the end of the taxon name is signaled by a single blank space. The blank space must be followed by the first character in your matrix, and end of the row is signalled by a carriage return. Relaxed Phylip can be interleaved, just like other formats.

Importantly, a Phylip file will often fail with relaxed format programs simply because it has more than one blank space after one or more taxon names.